Wednesday, 28 January 2015

10 Topical Questions

Time for a lighthearted quiz -

How many financial journalists does it take a network to cover a Greek election?

a) 1. To interview an expert.
b) 2. One to interview the other who is pretending to be an expert.
c) 4. One to do the story and three to rack up their airmiles.
d) 17 from Fox News. One to say that Greece is a no-go area for Germans and the other 16 to cover the resulting brouhaha.

What does it take to change a Greek government?

a) A majority
b) 36%
c) Eur 160bio
d) German stubbornness

If you have one Euro and use it to buy Swiss francs how many Euros worth of Swiss francs would you have?

a) 1.0000. You worked it out on paper, not in the real world.
b) 1.2000. Remember to send a Christmas card to the Swiss National Bank.
c) 0.9999. You had done the exchange using FX banks via the WMR 4pm fix.
d) 0.8300. You had done the exchange at an airport FX counter.
e) -100.0000. You used it as margin at 500x leverage with a retail FX broker and have just found that losses can exceed deposits.

If you join the dots on a Fed forecast dot-to-dot puzzle you get

a) March 2016
b) A blurry line that keeps moving.
b) Astigmatism
c) What ever you want if you stare at it long enough.

The ECB launched a QE program last week. If you could pick one star for Draghi to be for the night would it be

The film 'Indiana Jones - The Last Crusade' features which famous traders

a) Marc Faber as the grail knight in the cave of chalices waiting for someone to pick the real reason that China is a short.
b) Meredith Whitney as Dr Elsa Schneider driven by self promotion who ends up falling down a crevasse overeaching for the holy grail.
c) Peter Schiff as Sallah the larger than life amusing sidekick who is always warning Indy of the dangers of what he's doing.
d) Bill Gross as Walter Donovan the egotistic maniac after the holy grail to give himself eternal life.

If you were told that there was an impending snowy natural disaster coming your way and it was nowhere near as bad as they said would you

a) Thank your lucky stars
b) Be really annoyed that you can't have a week at home
c) Use it as a political weapon against local politicians
d) Put meteorologists alongside bankers on society's naughty step.
e) Be outraged and know you would feel the same way about any impeding asteroid strike.

If you were an Emerging Market economy would you switch all your funding into

a) USD as it's the base currency for most of your trade.
b) CHF because they pay you to borrow the stuff these days.
c) Euros because they will pay you to borrow it by the time you arrange the loan through the red tape
e) Greek Drachmas because though the interest rate is high you don't anticipate having to pay the principal back to anyone as that's how the Greeks treat debt apparently.

You have to get Weidmann, Draghi and Tsipras across a river. You are the only one who can row the small boat with room only for you and one other. How would you do it?

Anon - that is a great general theme but Electric Dragon has gone one further with some superb detail in his response to the FT Alphaville link to this post at http://ftalphaville.ft.com/2015/01/28/2102712/further-reading-1687/

Electric Dragon

Weidmann would insist that everyone has to swim across, but only at the most turbulent part of the river.

Draghi would not be opposed to the idea of rowing across, but will be forced to dismantle the boat and tell everyone to take a plank each.

Tsipras promised in his manifesto that he could make the EU part the river and walk across the riverbed.